In today’s world of off-shore tax havens,i quantitative easing,ii high frequency trading,iii and rampant global asset and real estate speculation it seems that a sort of gamified monetary space-race is going on and that it’s advancing with increasing speed. This monetary space-race game is one that is partially defined by both off-shoring and “on-shoring,” by both making assets disappear behind the legal shrouds provided by nation states that profit by providing secrecy to wealthy international clients and conglomerates, and by making virtual assets material in the form of, for example, international real-estate speculation.

But this immaterial/material financial binary is not adequate if we are to identify more comprehensively the space and spaces – the game dynamics – being put to work in service of global finance capital. For example, as but one expression of this monetary space-race, the recent tax haven scandals surrounding Panama’s Mossack Fonseca (which after two weeks of headlines is barely discussed anymore) is not so much about securing or profiting from locating capital in distant geographical spaces – tax-free islands, sandy beaches, and sun-drenched shell-company postal boxes, as it is about taking advantage of new and emerging forms of: 1) interstitial temporal spaces; 2) immaterial or undetectable digital spaces; and / or 3) invisible spaces that, as far as the public is aware, simply do not exist. That is, despite superficial appearances, the new monetary space-race is less about physically off-shoring capital and currency, than it is about staying ahead of the embittered and comparatively impoverished masses and the increasingly indebted governments ever more desperate for funds by hiding, or making invisible, digital money that’s been stored in “the cloud,” on the internet, or on an array of hard-drives. In other words, generating financial distance between wealth and the tax-hungry governments who would love access to it is not achieved through the separation offered by geographical space, but through the creation of new spaces, non-spaces, unknowable spaces that may or may not be physically located in a data-centre or business park next to you in Canada, London, New York,iv or Delaware.v